Oddly enough, though Gantry's attitude had been uncompromisingly partisan, Blount had failed to recognize in the railroad official a skilful pleader for the special interests--the interests of the few against those of the many. Hence he was preparing to go to the new field with a rather strong prepossession in favor of the defendant corporation. In their later conversation Gantry had intimated pretty broadly that there was room for an assistant corporation counsel for the railroad, with headquarters in the capital of the Sage-brush State. Blount assumed that the requirements, in the present crisis at least, would be political rather than legal, and in his mind's eye he saw himself in the prefigured perspective, standing firmly as the defender of legitimate business rights in a region where popular prejudice was capable of rising to anarchistic heights of denunciation and attack. The picture pleased him; he would scarcely have been a true descendant of the fighting Blounts of Tennessee if the prospect of a conflict had been other than inspiring. If there were to be no Patricia in his future, ambition must be made to fill all the horizons; and since work is the best surcease for any sorrow, he found himself already looking forward in eager anticipation to the moment when he could begin the grapple, man-wise and vigorously, in the new environment. It was after the ashes had been knocked from the bedtime pipe that Blount left his chair and the secluded corner of the veranda to go down among the parked automobiles on the lawn. His one recreation--and it was the only one in which he found the precious fillip of enthusiasm--was motoring. There was a choice collection of fine cars in the grouping on the lawn, and Blount had just awakened a sleepy chauffeur to ask him to uncover and exhibit the engine of a freshly imported Italian machine, when a stir at the veranda entrance told him that at least a few of the dancing guests were leaving early. Being more curious at the moment about the mechanism of the Italian motor than he was about people, he did not realize that he was an intruder until the chauffeur hastily replaced the engine bonnet and began to get his car ready for the road. Blount stepped back when the little group on the veranda came down the steps preceded by a club footman who was calling the number of the car. And it was not until he was turning away that he found himself face to face with a very beautiful and very clear-eyed young woman who was buttoning an automobile dust-coat up under her chin. "Patricia!" he burst out. And then: "For Heaven's sake! you don't mean to tell me that you have been here all evening?" Her slow smile gave the impression, not quite of frigidity perhaps, but of that quality of serene self-possession which strangers sometimes mistook for coldness. "Why shouldn't I be here?" she asked. "Didn't you know that the Cranfords--the people who are entertaining--are old friends of ours?"